| PJ Harvey, from People Magazine PJ HARVEY: She's got a pink catsuit and a dozen incarnations. When _The Village Voice_ announced two weeks ago that Harvey had won the New York City weekly's prestigious national critics's poll, chief pundit Robert Christgau called her "a good old-fashioned genius." That much-abused label just might fit the enigmatic 26-year-old singer and songwriter who has won nearly universal praise for her third, Grammy-nominated album, _To Bring You My Love_. For Harvey, a petite 5'4" chameleon whose look swings from vamp to vampirish, being designated a genius beats other things she has been called. Most people, she once said, tend to take her for "a mad bitch woman from hell. I can't get enough sex or blood." Offstage, in fact, she's a demure, publicity-shy Brit from the West Country. Her music-loving parents, stonemason Ray and sculptor Eva, often hosted weekend bashes attendend by their friends Rolling Stone drummer Charlei Watts and the late rock pianist Ian Stewart. "I am really lucky I had a mother and father like that," Harvey said last year. "I mean, they reall are rockers, much more than I am." Signed by Island Records in 1992, Harvey began hearing the g-word almost immediately. But to her, music has little "to do with your head," she told London's Q magazine. "It's to do with your body, which is a very sexual instrument." |
